Stephen King and The Fight for Low Culture

Counting novels, novellas, and short story compilations as one apiece, I've determined that over the past seventeen years, I've read 34 pieces of fiction (and one piece of non-fiction) written by American horror novelist Stephen King.  This is remarkable to me, because most of the books were read by me before I hit the age of eighteen, where for a long period of time, I swore off reading any fiction whatsoever (excepting what may have been assigned to me in a random college English class).  However, I have very strong memories of each of these - remember in It, it was the Turtle that ruled the world?  I did, when earlier this year reading the third Dark Tower novel, fifteen years after reading It.  It's a quick reference, but it's the type of self-referential "love note" that true fans would understand.

I've recently started reading some of King's newer* works and find that, largely, the skills that made his early writing so powerful and horrifying have held up.  (*NOTE: To me, the defining break point in King's career was the 1999 accident that nearly killed him and threw him into a bizarre semi-retirement that lasted until the second half of the last decade.  What I feel is true about this incident is, like many near-death experiences, it focused him and led him to complete unfinished projects (such as the Dark Tower series), and also that - in a strange way - it improved his writing style.  I've never written horror, but I do believe that writing horrifying stuff well requires background real-life material to make the content work.  Further, it's my opinion that most of King's work produced in the ten years preceding his accident was his weakest - maybe because King, a recovering alcoholic, was sober and happy in his life.  But somehow, in some way, getting hit by a minivan and almost dying led an aging man to write with a youthful pen again.  I find it fascinating.)

As is deserving for anyone who can perform at a high level for nearly 40 years, King has won numerous literary awards, including a lifetime achievement award from the National Book series.  When this happened, the criticism from the academic literary elite (while not unanimous - some critics realized what I'm about to write, which was nice) was fairly devastating.  Below is but one example (which I've pulled from King's Wikipedia page, so take with a grain of salt), from literary critic and renowned douchebag Harold Bloom, who wrote: "[King] shares nothing with Edgar Allen Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis."

Bloom does have a point, in the shallowest sense possible - King shares little with Poe.  Poe's writing is dry, stodgy, and carries the same mainstream appeal as an article regarding econometric analysis of paying for prostitutes.  The idea that King's writing should be the same as Poe's, however, is frightening to me and leads me to the main point of this post.  Wherever intellectual capital is spent in academia, whether with regard to cancer research or social psychology, global warming or what constitutes "quality" fiction, there is sometimes a tendency to emphasize the complex over the simple.  The inaccessible over the obvious.  And this, quite frankly, seems incorrect to me (at least in some instances).

If you look at it through the lens of a technician, King's writing is not the highest quality writing in the fiction universe.  He does not use huge words often (though, when he uses them, they are almost always in the correct context), his sentence structure can lack complexity, and the dialogue he creates can, at its worst, remind a reader of the script of a George Lucas movie (particularly when through the vehicle of a female or a minority character - though he deserves credit for ignoring his own weaknesses and putting so many of these characters in his novels).

I think, though, that if you asked King questions about the three points I've just mentioned in the last paragraph, he would tell you that this isn't what he's trying to accomplish in the first place.  He's trying to accomplish a feeling - specifically, he's trying to freak his Constant Readers the fuck out - and for this, and for this only, he will never receive the full critical acclaim that he deserves.

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The 1990 complete and uncut version of King's The Stand is, far and away, the most frightening novel I will ever read.  (In the novel, an accident releases a powerful chemical weapon that kills almost all of the world within two weeks from a horrible version of the flu virus.  That's only half the story, and I implore you to read the whole thing though it's over 1,000 pages long.  However, it's all you need to know in order for me to make my point.)  What makes it most frightening is the prophetic realism of the end-of-the-world scenario - the idea that our human-made technologies may one day outpace us with drastic consequences is a theme that permeates much of King's canon, but nowhere are the implications so crisp nor the details so specific as the first 400 pages (or so) of The Stand.  King builds up intricate emotional backstories for about a hundred or so characters, and then kills almost all of them.  Mercilessly.  It's an incredible literary feat, and the story goes on (and gets better) from this point forward.

(ASIDE: On the other end of the spectrum is the Dark Tower series, a 4,000+ page narrative, written over thirty years and over seven volumes, that I find just as intriguing - though the story centers around less than ten (maybe even fewer) characters.  It's a Tolkien-esque endeavor reading so many pages of description - the novels sometimes lack dialogue almost entirely for hundreds of pages at a time - but the writing is so crisp and the suspense so strong that I sometimes can't put the books down for hours at a time.  I bring this up as an illustration of King's ability to write effectively in more than one literary context.  He's also dabbled in poetry, though I don't care for it.)

In my senior year of high school, I was given free rein - or so I thought - to select my own topic for my English thesis.  It had been six years or so since I'd read The Stand (I was WAYYYY too young for reading it the first time, but that's what I did and I'll let mental-health professionals sort out the rest), but I'd sensed a parallel between the end-of-the-world scenario contained therein and the poetry of William Butler Yeats (specifically, 1919's "The Second Coming," for those who are interested).  My idea (or how I remember it, a decade later) was to integrate the two works into a coherent whole, trying to understand how two completely disparate pieces of fiction, written in two different generations, can reflect the attitudes of the public in times of distress.

I think it would have been an excellent paper, but it was shot down in its original form by my teacher, who did not feel that Stephen King was a serious writer and did not want my thesis paper to be focused on such a silly topic.  Now, in her defense, what I ended up writing was sent to Ivy League admissions departments in an attempt to get me off of wait lists - so she had a huge point in the general sense that other people would be reading the paper.  But thinking back to my entire academic career, this was the paper I wish I'd written to this very day - the events of September 11, 2001 were not yet a year old, and I'd understood something that I think was a hell of a point to make in print.

People read things like The Stand (and "The Second Coming," I suppose) because they relate to the emotional aspect of frightening scenarios.  It builds them up, somehow, it gives them strength, and perhaps like riding a roller coaster or skydiving, it feels cool.  It's the reason why, as much as many of King's readers enjoy his stories, they almost always stay for his first person exit-ludes; they stay for the explanations of the stories, the motivations and what went into writing the story that had just been read.  It's slightly pretentious to do such a thing, sure, but it makes things seem human again.  It's like the cool-down period after vigorous exercise or after a psychological experiment.  It makes sense.

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In retrospect, the failed thesis paper experiment of 2002 explains a lot about the trajectory my career took.  I ended up a better social scientist than I would ever have made a writer (though I still think I can - and will - write something useful, one day).  Getting back to Ol' Steve, I feel that critical respect for King's "low culture" stories will always depend on the critic's appreciation of an emotional approach to writing.  To the extent that an observer can get beyond the Holy shit, this was really effective at scaring people analysis of King's best writing and move onto the Well, how did he make that happen? analysis, what they'll find is the idea that good writing doesn't necessarily need to be difficult to understand.

Quality literature only needs to move the whole damn paradigm of what good writing is forward - and no one has done this more effectively over the past forty years than King.

On New Cars and the 2012 World Series of Poker

Last month, I wrote a blog post regarding my deciding whether to trade in (or privately sell) my three-year-old Honda Civic for a newer, nicer car.  It started a great deal of what I would call spirited debate and opinion; I received many well thought out opinions on either side of the argument.  I would say that those who took the time to present an opinion were equally divided with regard to whether they felt I should take the leap, or stick with the car that I have.

Once I realized what a nerve the argument struck with my friends and family, I realized this was an important decision.  I decided at that point to take some time (about a month) to think about it.  No decision that expensive should be entered into lightly and I really wanted to make sure that, whatever I ended up deciding, I could look back and say to my future self that I took the time to think it over.  In the meanwhile, I priced out various cars and determined the impact that upgrading would have on my monthly budget.  Here's what I found out:

Currently I spend about $300 in an average month (not counting oil changes or other routine maintenance) on driving - that's fuel and insurance combined, and I drive 240 miles a week for work alone.  So all things considered, I don't spend a great deal of money on this expense, it's reasonable to see.  Upgrading my car would add an approximate $250 monthly for the car payment alone.  I would be charged an additional $30-40 per month for insurance, depending on the model I selected (luxury cars are more likely to crash) and with decreased fuel economy and the need to switch from regular to premium fuel, you could also tack another $40-$60 per month onto the budget for gasoline.

So I would be increasing my monthly car expenditure from $300 to $650, which doesn't really appeal to me at all.  But that's just the dollars and cents of it.  Increasingly in my conversations with people who were on the "Buy & Hold" side of the argument, they focused on what else I could be doing with the cash I'd be saving by keeping the Civic.  This, in particular, resonated with me because we have a honeymoon coming up that we haven't even started planning yet (vacations frighten us) and I also think that it's important to travel while the traveling is good.

All of this leads me to My Decision: for the time being, I'll be keeping my low-cost, low-maintenance Honda Civic.  (Certainly where possible I will continue to save for the new car.)  But in 2012, I will be taking my talents to Sin City - Las Vegas, Nevada, to participate in that year's World Series of Poker.

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Many professional poker players say they grew up in families that played cards constantly.  I played enough growing up to know what the suits were, and that Aces were better than Kings in most games, but when the Internet Poker Boom hit, and when an unassuming accountant named Chris Moneymaker won $2,500,000 for finishing first in the 2003 WSOP main event, I had absolutely no clue what Texas Hold 'Em was.  Shortly thereafter I read a magazine article about the event, and I was instantly hooked on poker.  I needed to understand what the craze was about.  It seemed to suit me perfectly.

I started to play online for real money in 2005, on a now-defunct poker site from Australia called Noble Poker.  Having read only one book on tournament poker, Harrington on Hold 'Em Volume 1, and having the good sense to know only to play good hands against aggressive players, I cleaned up.  I'd sometimes show up at my summer internship on Monday mornings saying things like "I turned last week's paycheck into $2,700 over the weekend" just by gambling online.  The online poker pool back then was filled with fish, and with (charitably speaking) only half of the poker skills I currently hold now, I was a giant freaking shark.  I had some upswings and some downswings that summer, but ended up pocketing a couple grand that was very helpful spending money during my upcoming senior year of college.

Over the following six years, I played a considerable amount of Hold 'Em, and at present I can safely say that I'm talented enough that if I can be patient, prudent, and obtain a better-than-average amount of luck, I can play a WSOP event in the game and make the money*.  (NOTE: Some of you may not know what making the money is, so I should explain a little bit about basic poker tournament structure here.  Unlike in a cash game, where players bet chips that represent actual dollars, poker tournaments are paid for with a flat fee, known as a buy-in, for which you receive in return a fixed amount of tournament chips.  About eighty percent of the players who buy into any poker tournament will lose their tournament chips and will not make any money for it, but the top twenty or so percent of finishers will survive long enough to earn the reward - making the money.  Making the money is a nice first goal, especially when you think you might be outclassed by the caliber of players in a given tournament, but because payouts increase exponentially toward the very top finishers, the actual goal is survival and dominance to the very end.) 

It's story time.  In the summer of 2009, I was mired in a huge poker playing slump when I drove to the Borgata in Atlantic City to play in a $100 buy-in tournament that guaranteed at least $10,000 in total payouts.  (For whatever it's worth, my slump actually lasted into 2010, but this was a highlight amidst a very long run of sub-par poker play on my end.)  That particular night, however, I ground it out for hours, with my self-preservation reflex in full control.  I played solid, small-ball poker throughout most of the tournament, until I became hot at exactly the right time - when about fifty players were left, out of the original 350-plus - accumulating piles and piles of chips as we entered the money.  With only thirteen players left at 2 AM the following day, those of us still alive in the tournament elected to stop playing and divide the money amongst ourselves (the chop), and I took home a nice payday of $3,000 for my troubles.

I think back to this tournament a ton, because (a) it reminds me that, if I could play that well when I was in a huge rut, I could conceivably play much better given that I'm playing much much better poker on average right now; and (b) on the other side of the coin, it reminds me that lots of people play these tournaments without giving the game nearly the amount of thought and rigor that I do, and that should in the long run give me an advantage.  Poker is very much a game played within the margins - by that, I mean that the difference between great play and terrible play is very slim and can only be detected over a long series of games - and on Any Given Sunday, I could be able to beat even a group of players more talented than I.

(If you've made it this far, click the link below, watch the video, and get ready to run through a goddamned brick wall.)

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Ahem... the above video leads me to my next point.  My life philosophy is dominated by thoughts of my own mortality.  We're all alive for a short and finite amount of time, and playing in a World Series of Poker tournament event will cross a crucial item off my bucket list.  Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't play in the $10,000 buy in main event because it's too expensive, and also it's the most popular event by far and over the years it's turned into a lottery.

I wouldn't want to play for those high stakes right now unless I were certain I had a potential advantage, and in the main event any advantages are diluted by the sheer number of people who sign up to play the damned thing.  My likely destination would be one of the many $1,500 buy in events that precede the main event.  Hopefully other poker playing friends of mine would choose to join me for this tournament, just to say they played in the real deal.  Who knows, maybe one or two of us would get lucky.

Realistically, the odds are against me winning a great deal of money on this excursion.  I could lose all of my chips in the first 30 minutes of the tournament, after wagering those chips with the best hand - that's just how the game of poker works.  But I will practice over the next twelve months to become the best poker player I can be, so that win or lose, I can say I put every ounce of effort I had into the tournament. 

Intelligently, the folks who run the WSOP have over the past few years started a traveling "circuit" of events around the country.  These are generally smaller-scale versions of the WSOP itself, with equally modest (respectively speaking) fees for entering the events.  I'm aware that playing in the WSOP in Las Vegas, I would be playing a higher caliber of player than in regularly scheduled tournaments in Atlantic City.  Thusly, it's important that I "train" for next summer by exposing myself to a few tournaments over the next year that have slightly higher buy-ins than I am currently used to.  As such, my training begins in earnest this December, at the WSOP circuit event in Harrah's in Atlantic City, New Jersey. 

Let's shuffle up and deal...

Grading Recent Commercials, Part V: The Game Within The Game

I'm bringing back one of my favorite blog post themes after a fairly long hiatus, because lots of commercials these days deserve to be analyzed, criticized, and demonized (that's a little Walt "Clyde" Frazier, for y'all) and I'm a little tired of blogging about serious topics like homeownership.  I'll get back to that theme later this week, but I finally have some time to watch terrible TV and of course I also paid attention to the advertisements.  So without further ado... boys, let's get to it (to it)...

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Commercial #1: Another Case of Playing Dumbly to Gender

As someone who very strongly feels that the country is transitioning toward a post-gender mentality (by this I mean that fewer and fewer topics, decisions, and emotions are "only for women" or "only for men"), I am routinely dismayed when commercials exist for products that strike me as intuitively gender-neutral, but are pitched in such a gender-specific way that my fiancee and I can both watch the commercial and get pissed off for completely different reasons.

I am going to ignore the feminist argument with regard to this sausage commercial, because I'm not here to make the feminist argument (it's ripe for the taking, though). I am here, however, to argue that making a commercial like this is retarded, business-wise.  Imagine that you are tasked with the responsibility to pitch sausage.  Sausage is so easy to sell, it's almost as easy as bacon.  It's delicious, salty, and applies to lots of recipes.  Hell, I'm eating sausage right now, as I type this.

Chicken sausage (the product being marketed here) is probably easier to sell than regular sausage, because many people like to eat healthy foods that remind them of not-so-healthy food.  Now, both men and women like sausage - in fact, if you look at men who live alone, I bet almost all of them eat sausage.  So the first problem here is that focusing so much on the woman is counterproductive and limiting.

Above and beyond this, the second problem with the ad is that it's confusing.  What's the "get" here?  Is it the patronizing servitude of the wife (to be honest, I still can't tell whether it's ironic or not)?  Is it the bizarre dance lesson interlude, which makes absolutely no sense because only the woman is dancing and she is wearing 1980's style fitness clothing?  Is the commercial designed for women to like it, or men, or both, or neither?

I seriously cannot tell whether the intent of this ad is "Check us out, we're quirky and unique, you'll love our products" or instead whether they're trying to pull a Sterling Cooper ad circa 1961 with a basket of kisses or some shit.  Did anyone run this commercial through a focus group, and if so, why didn't they ask people if they were confused by the commercial?  Because I can't understand what's going on here, and - given that I work in market research - if I can't understand what's going on, does anyone else?

I think the problem is that too much is going on here.  Commonly when I watch a commercial for something that isn't "designed" for me, I'm able to at least rationalize that someone out there exists for whom this commercial is relevant.  (You can call this the Sarah Palin effect, but for commercials, if you'd like.)  But chicken sausage is something I'd buy, and I'm not sure, in the case of the above commercial, that anyone in the world (or, at least anyone I know) could find it even remotely tolerable.

Grade: F


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Commercial #2: A Matter of Timing

Previously I tore apart a commercial that did too much.  Sometimes a commercial can err on the side of doing too little - witness the above commercial for Worx energy drink.  (Oddly enough, another very similar product, 5-Hour Energy, has the exact same problem I'm about to describe in its own commercials, which makes me wonder whether the two products are owned by the same company.)

Time is obviously a very limited entity in a 30- or 40-second commercial, so to maximize the short amount of time you have, timing is important.  Most commercials get right to the action, with barely a second of silent context (if that) before the dialogue begins.  This commercial is, obviously, quite different.  It's 40 seconds long and only has four scenes - each showing a person who needs an energy boost explaining why the product "Worx" for them.

It's not ineffective from a content perspective, but there is at least two seconds after each cut before the individual starts to speak.  Silence in a commercial these days is rare - we watch TV in an era where it's perfectly appropriate for an actress to scream at the top of their lungs for ten seconds in the middle of a cell phone commercial - but all of these seconds of silence in the middle cost the Worx company money.  People viewing the ad will get distracted, because after all, they aren't paying attention in the first place (unless they're crazy, like me), and they don't need that much context to get the point.  Or, alternatively, Worx could have gotten rid of the long pauses between cuts and saved about ten seconds (and about 25% of their advertising budget, if my math is correct).

Interestingly enough, the actors in the commercials are fairly low key.  I know a few people who use these products, and they're all pretty amped up people in the first place.  I'm surprised by the casting decision, but ultimately not that surprised since a commercial with such glaring problems in the first place had to have been designed cheaply, and in house.

Grade: D

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Commercial #3: Brainssssssssssssss....

Don't get me wrong.  It's not that I feel zany commercials can't work... if the timing is appropriate and the content is funny, zaniness can work very well.  I submit for the approval of the Midnight Society the above commercial, for the Toshiba Satellite laptop computer.  In it, an engineer/decision maker decides that the laptop needs to have a tough casing just in case a future broken laptop leads to a national power blackout and subsequent zombie apocalypse.

Students of zombie apocalypses know very well that drinking spoiled milk does not directly lead to the spread of the virus Solanum (which we all know is scientifically proven to transmit a hunger for brains).  However, this doesn't really matter because zombies are awesome, and also zombies these days are pretty mainstream.  (Hell, the CDC recently posted a legitimate zombie apocalypse scenario online - officially - as a satiric play to get people interested in disaster preparedness.)  It's about time that someone in Ad Kingdom capitalized on this in a unique and interesting way.

The point of any advertisement should be to present an engaging, relevant message that is unique and believable.  You'll win engaging points if your commercial is hilarious, and this commercial is also daring (I mean, look at the zombie still frame above, it's a little disheartening to look at).  But also, it's not hard to get the point of the commercial, and the message is quite clear - Toshiba thinks of everything.  In my opinion this commercial excels, due to its attention grabbing nature, comical and engaging content, and excellent timing.

Grade: A

Arguing For (and Against) Upgrading My Car

I drive a base model 2009 Honda Civic coupe that is in good condition and is paid off.  It does everything I need it to do adequately, it's moderately fun to drive, it sips gas no matter how fast I drive, and it's like a cockroach - it'll never break down, even in event of nuclear war.  It also completely lacks features and even though I've owned it for less than three years, I've been thinking recently that I want to upgrade my automobile.

Last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published an article regarding current prices for used cars that are (a) Japanese, (b) fuel-efficient, and (c) less than four years old.  Simply put, those who decided to purchase fuel-efficient small foreign cars in 2008 are now seeing historically high resale and trade-in values for these cars on the open market today.  This is due to fuel prices that are approaching 2008 levels, as well as the Japan earthquake/tsunami back in March which led to a serious kink in the supply chain.  Further, because 2008 was such a shitty year economy-wise, fewer people bought new cars then, so there happen to be fewer three-year-old cars to sell at this point in time.  Combine that with the idea that if someone plans to buy a used car, buying a three-year-old used car is optimal (based on how car values depreciate over time), and you have a perfect storm of factors combining to create these market conditions for selling or trading in my car.

The WSJ.com article cites Jesse Toprak of Truecar.com, who states (emphasis mine): "The best case scenario is that you have a trade-in that is somewhat gas efficient, and you are ready to trade for a larger vehicle."

You've heard part of my situation earlier in the post, but here's the second part: I bought the Civic when I was a second-year Ph.D. student, about three months before the idea of leaving graduate school and entering industry entered my mind.  I earned $25,000 as a graduate student in 2008, and with the idea of spending three (or four, or more) years after that as a graduate student in my head, buying an inexpensive car with low monthly payments certainly made sense to me at the time.

Without going into too much detail, entering industry has been a modestly successful financial decision for me, and I've been able to pay off the car in just under three years.  So given all of this, it may be time to upgrade my driving situation.

If I were to upgrade my driving situation, here's how I'd do it:

•  I'd consider trading in my Civic (it'd be worth something like $14,000 as a trade-in), but might also sell it privately on Craigslist (where it might be worth up to $16,000).
• I'd supplement the cash from selling the Civic with some savings I've already put toward a new car (which are about $3,000).
• With that $17,000-$19,000 in hand, I'd finance the rest.  I'd only want to spend about $30,000 on the car, which would likely be a new "entry level luxury sedan" (think something like the Acura TSX, except not an Acura TSX)...
• ...because I want to keep my monthly payments under $250/month (which is about what my monthly payments were for the Civic).

I haven't made up my mind yet.  I've told myself that I'll wait another month before I do.  That being said, here are the best arguments I can think of for why I should make the leap and upgrade my car, as well as some reasons why I shouldn't...

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Reasons Why Fred Should Upgrade His Car

1. The Market's Telling Me To: I've discussed this above in enough detail, so I'll leave it at that.
2. It's Affordable Within Our Budget: Because of the plan I outlined above, the monthly payment I'd have with the new car would be roughly the same as what I was able to afford as a graduate student.  With the increased cash flow (compared with graduate school) in my industry position, there's no reason - short of being laid off, which is unlikely because the company I work for is doing fairly well, or having multiple kids, which is unlikely because I don't want a heart attack - that I wouldn't be able to afford the car payment over the next three or four years.
3. I'm Only Young Once, and it's "Time": I do work kind of hard, and having this house has been more maintenance work than I'd originally anticipated.  Given all of this, it'd be nice not to have to drive something pedestrian home from work, or around town.  My current car doesn't have a moonroof, power seats, or even Electronic Stability Control (which is an important added safety feature, required on cars sold in the US after model year 2009).
4. Reminds Me Of My Youth: I haven't had a nice car (and I'm using the term "nice" really liberally here) since my first car, which was a ten-year-old used Nissan Maxima that went pretty fast and was really fun to drive.  Being able to purchase a car in that range of automobile, but new, would have added meaning for me because it suggests that I've actually made something of my pitiful self.
5. The Economy Could Use The Gentle Caress of My Stimulus: An argument can be made - and I suppose I am making it - that in times of economic stagnation, those who can afford it should spend rather than save.  If the market's telling me to buy, it could be that it's telling some others to buy as well, and that's how economic recoveries tend to get started (or, in this case, start back up again).

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Reasons Why Fred Should NOT Upgrade His Car

1. We Just Bought a House: We're so new in this house that we haven't had a full round of monthly bills yet.  I'm confident in my ability to budget and project future expenses, but I'm not sure if I'm ready to wager an additional monthly payment and $10,000 of debt on my ability to do this.  It might be better if I waited a couple of months, in the sense that we'd know better how much our energy bills fluctuate with the summer time, etc.  
2. We Just Bought a House, Part Deux: Also, I'm kind of worried about how it would look to others if, after having just bought a house at my age, I bought a new car with a luxury label on it a month later.  The neighborhood we live in is nice, but it's working-class for sure, and there are definitely people on the block with fixed incomes.  I like to get along with the neighbors, and first impressions count for a great deal, and I feel like the new kids on the block already have a strike against them in the first place.  I'd rather not seem a douchebag (at least until we've had more time to get settled).
3. I'm Kind of Anti-Debt: I have some small student loans, which are no big deal, but we have a mortgage now, which kind of is a big deal, and a car loan on top of that would be another layer of consumer debt that I don't care to have.  Some people don't mind carrying lots of debt, but to me it's an albatross around my neck and I feel like I have to pay it off as quickly as possible.  This is probably good for me in the long run (it certainly keeps my credit score high), but it makes decisions like this one excruciating because I know the pleasure of driving is going to be countered by the annoyance of making another monthly payment for a while.
4. Fears of Lifestyle Inflation: Simply put, if I buy this car and when the time comes to buy a new car in 2015 or something, what if our financial situation is worse than it is now?  Am I condemning myself to a lifetime of needing a nice car, and feeling inadequate if I have to go back to driving a Honda?  That would be really sad (and it would make me a very disgusting person).
5. It's Just a Car, Man: The argument here is that a car is a means of getting from Point A to Point B, and as a mode of transportation there's no reason for it to be a luxury car.  This is completely rational (and functionally incorrect) because that's not what a car is to most people - otherwise, everyone would be driving 15-year-old Civics (because those cars literally never break down).  We have emotional attachments to our cars, and many people can ground a memory based on what car they were driving at that time in their life.  So I disagree with this argument, but I'm listing it here just because I know that some do agree with it.

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So there you have it.  I'm not sure there is a correct answer to this, and I'm absolutely sure there are other arguments here that I've missed entirely.  I'm seriously wrestling with the decision (as you can tell, and even though I've spoken with a number of people about it, and most think that I should jump on the purchase).  Once I decide, people will know...

The Hopeless Homeowner Series, Chapter 2: Adventures in Modern Landscaping

This is the second installment of a series of posts regarding our misadventures in owning a home.  We recently bought a home in an active adult community (well, not really, but let's just say we're the spring chickens on the block by a decent decade and a half), and we have a great deal more space to live in now.  Proportional to the increased living space is the increased complexity and nuance of owning a home, as well as all the stuff you have to buy and all of things that go wrong in the process.  The stories are as follows...

Whether they are aware of this or not, adults exist somewhere on a continuum of willingness to endure chores typically considered to be "workmanlike".  (To me, "workmanlike" tasks involve a serious amount of dirt, fumbling around with tools, sweat, and/or muscular ability.  I would use the term "blue-collar" instead, but I think the term is inaccurate and outdated in a time and place where sanitation employees routinely earn six-figure incomes.)

There are those people who, through some combination of engineering inclination, stick-to-it-ive-ness, fearlessness, love of the outdoors, and creativity, learn to do everything on their own and truly become handy.  These are the folks that you call when you can't figure out how something works, you've already spent an hour or two Googling the problem, and you've found the problem to be so strange that you need someone whom you know has encountered - and solved - it before.  They'll remember the fix, even if it was an isolated incident that happened ten years ago, and they'll walk you through it in about five minutes.  (Sometimes they'll be so proud of themselves for remembering the fix that they'll thank you for prompting the recall, but that's a completely different story altogether...)

On the other end of the continuum are those who are so inexperienced (or so scared) of simple household maintenance chores that they barely attempt to try them, instead deciding to outsource them to other people.  I am scared to death of falling into this category, because it's an easy way to bleed cash and it announces to the entire world that I am lazy (or at worst, a classist), and it violates my fundamental moral code of self-sufficiency.

I'm so inexperienced at this type of stuff that, while I know where I'd like to be, I have no clue where I currently exist on this continuum.  So far, I've managed not to call a professional for all but the obvious tasks (e.g., replacing a water heater, which requires welding equipment and such acumen that the otherwise-handy people whom I typically call for advice always call professionals to install for them).  But on the other hand, I routinely take several days - and several attempts - to finish even the simplest installation projects, which is strange because I am typically quite the impatient individual.

But I've found that sleeping on a difficult step to fixing something works for me - I approach it again with a new perspective, and I'm well-rested and in a different (if not better) mood at the time, and more often than not the damned problem gets fixed the second time around.  Which is good when you consider the lawnmower debacle...


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For a number of reasons, which include but are not limited to my own laziness, the willingness of others to complete the task, and a life course that took me from college to five years of shuffling between apartments in different parts of the country, I had never managed to mow any lawn between 1997 and 2011.

When we moved into the house last month (and before the move, and after the move), I was incredibly worried about having to mow the lawn again.  The gap in completing a task that is ingrained in the mind of any warmblooded American male as an incredibly warmblooded American male-type thing to do, to be frank, made me feel pretty damned impotent - it was like because I had gone so long without doing the task, that some window of grasping how to mow the lawn had passed and I would never be able to learn for the rest of my life.

(NOTE: I use the word "impotent" metaphorically, but the metaphor I think is clear - many men need to know they can perform as men, and you can fill in the task with whatever you're thinking of, but that's a fact.  There's a reason that Viagra commercials involve getting things done - an act is an act, whether it's sexual or not, and while sometimes a cigar is a cigar, most of the time a rowboat is not a rowboat.)

(A SECOND NOTE: I concede that the idea of there being a developmental period where it's easiest to learn how to mow the lawn is fucking stupid.  But every dude that's in my position would also concede that they wish they'd learned these tasks as a child, because then they would always remember how to do these things.  Blaming the parents, as always, is the easiest way out.)

The key to mowing the lawn for the first time was obtaining a considerable amount of help.  (Getting this help led to a far more positive outcome than the night before, when I tried to add fuel to the mower by myself.  The details are irrelevant here, but suffice it to say the process didn't work, I got pretty angry at the fuel tank, and ended up breaking a fairly innocent pair of sunglasses against the wall of the garage.)  Thankfully, my fiancee's dad worked with me for fifteen minutes to figure out how to add fuel to the mower for the first time, and watched me for another twenty as I remembered how to "draw lines" across the backyard, and reminded me that the grass bag needs emptying two or three times during the process.

This is not an isolated incident.  I'm speechless at the countless acts of kindness and patience that other people have lent us over the past month or so.  I'm a quick student but not a particularly patient one, so I don't know what I'd be able to accomplish without the help of more seasoned homeowners.  I have no way to repay my gratitude.  Anyway...

I certainly would recommend a Honda self-propelled lawnmower to anyone who is new to the art of mowing.  It doesn't really matter which Honda, although I suggest you pick the one that best fits the relative size of your yard (our land is about a third of an acre; we bought the $500 model which works just fine).  The instruction manual is eminently readable, actual operation is so easy that even a dolt like me got the hang of it relatively quickly, and it's a Honda so it's reliable and fuel-efficient.  However, filling a lawn mower with fuel must require a Ph.D. or something, because it took me forever to figure out how to get gas to come out of the fuel tank.

Back in 1997 (why, back in my day!), you took a funnel, stuck it into the mower's fuel tank, and poured gasoline from your rusted metal tank into the mower that way.  These days, I guess to make fuel tanks safer and also more obnoxious, the plastic tanks have a plastic nozzle that you have to prime (think Shake Weight). After you're done making obscene sexual gestures, you then insert it into (think of whatever you want) the mower's fuel tank, so that air is able to escape the plastic tank while the lawn mower is being fueled.  I think - maybe - I have the hang of this now, but I recommend having someone on hand who knows what they're doing while gassing your new Honda lawnmower for the first time.  It'll save you time and effort, and quite possibly, a new pair of cheap sunglasses.

(This will be what our backyard will look like by mid-June.  Just keep repeating this as a mantra...)

Introducing the Hopeless Homeowner Series

Recently we bought a house.  It's a suburban split-level home, about fifty-five years old (so, it's about half the age of the average resident of the street where we reside).  Though it's a nice home, things in it break often.  As they break and as we - people way too young and way too under-prepared for this massive moneypit to maintain - attempt to fix them, the "Hopeless Homeowner" series of blog posts will chronicle these attempts with levity, humor, and hopefully some halfway decent advice.

Chapter 1: The Horror of Moving

We were well aware that this was the last move we could conduct this way.  After we had settled here for a number of years and decided to move, we would have to hire professional movers to move into our second home; we'd have too much stuff by then, and we'd be older then, and our friends would be less willing to lift our boxes in exchange for pizza and beer that we haven't paid for yet.

But at present, we could do things the old-fashioned way and rent ourselves a U-Haul truck.  This was a sixteen-footer, which meant that we could move everything in a maximum of two trips.  The price was reasonable and it had an automatic transmission, so we felt we were good to go.  Now, there was no chance in hell that I was ever going to drive this thing - I'd heard horror stories from my Dad, from back in the day when U-Haul trucks were on a stick shift, and if the current set up were any more user friendly than it was back then, I was not about to find out for sure. 

My fiancee, luckily, was willing to drive this vehicular monstrosity.  She made it from the rental place to our apartment just fine, but even she will admit that the first trip from the apartment to the new home was harrowing.  I felt it was horrific - the truck was difficult to steady when loaded to the gills, and it had such a wide girth (giggity) that it was challenging to keep it within one lane of a multi-lane highway. 

At one point, we hopped the curb on Route 18 in New Brunswick and had difficulty finding pavement again.  The drive between our old apartment and our new home is kind of challenging, even by New Jersey standards, and even when driving a regular passenger car.  There are multiple left exits, a traffic circle, lots of right-hand merges, and many curves.  Also, New Jersey drivers are not particularly well known for their compassion or empathy when it comes to being around slow-moving vehicles; this is a cramped and dense place, and people like to get where they are going fast.  There is little of the thrill of the open road in the Garden State, and when it comes to not traveling the speed limit, the weak are indeed killed and eaten here. 

It almost goes without saying that the U-Haul truck we had rented and loaded with over 3,000 pounds of our personal belongings was not agile enough for most of our neighboring drivers' standards. After parking the truck at the new house, she told me that it reminded her of the drunk driving simulator glasses that schools provide to students.

Since then, I've seen many rental trucks on the highway in our daily travels.  I've seen many cars on the road do things like pass these rental trucks on the right hand side or honk at them to get them to move faster, and this is a really terrible thing to do.  The only qualification to rent one of these trucks is a valid drivers' license, and many of the people driving them have never navigated the road in something even half as unwieldy before in their lives.  So combine the average driver's level of incompetence with a ten-times-more challenging vehicle to drive, and the moral of the story is - if you see a U-Haul on the road, give it a wide berth and an even wider dose of patience.

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My best friends know that I don't handle Moving Day well.  They tell me this all the time, and that's why they're best friends.  Those 1-2 days surrounding a move are terrible, though - you feel pressured by the clock as you count down the last 48 hours before the move starts, and you also feel as if you're regressing backwards in time.  Items that were once creature comforts in your old home (like soap, or toilet paper) become challenging items to find.  For a brief while, you're a traveler without a home, you're a vagabond and you'd gladly give your soul (assuming these exist) to be settled down someplace.

After you move, it's the reverse, upward climb to the modern days.  The first night in your new home, before the boxes and the clothing are unpacked, before all but the barest essentials are set up, you're happy to have a toothbrush, an operable toilet bowl, and a mattress on the floor upon which to fall unconscious.  By the second night, you've left the Dark Ages (at least) and through a day of pure hard work, you've set up the basics - utensils, the refrigerator, the next few days' worth of clothing, and you're now sleeping on an actual bed.  By the third or fourth night, you've ordered a few appliances and if you're lucky, Cable Claus might stop by with a stocking filled with TV and high-speed Internet.  You've possibly gone on a grocery shopping trip and you're no longer eating leftover pizza and sub sandwiches from Moving Day.

As we've ascended from the prehistoric times of Night 1 to the practically modern times that we live in now, I've become easier to get along with.  I've learned recently that some people call migraine headaches "vacation headaches" because they sometimes occur as a function of too much anticipation leading up to the vacation itself - once vacations starts, all of that anticipation is released at once, and the end result is the headache.  I don't get these headaches, but I do get really stressed out right after something major and life-changing happens, and that's what happened with the move.  Also, that's what happened with the sunglasses - I'll tell that story later.

We're 16 days in - I'm etching tiny marks in the cinderblock walls of the basement like Andy Dufresne, counting the days until my release to a 55+ active adult community - and by now we've unpacked most of our boxes.  The living room floor, which was once a chaotic staging area for sixteen different home improvement projects, has nothing but a few boxes of DVD's and all of my tools.  (Hey, this is the last time in my adult life that I'll be able to keep my tools so centrally located in the house, so you bet your ass that I am milking this for all it is worth.)

Most days, with considerable help and patience from others, I am able to complete at least one homeowner task.  Generally these have been simple chores, owing mostly to the fact that we bought a nice house that was practically "move-in ready" (to borrow the realtor parlance).  I've been able to mow the lawn twice, we've pulled weeds and bought new plants that we're trying valiantly not to kill.  I've installed a towel rack (more complicated than you'd think when drilling into tile), replaced a thermosensor in our oven, started pipe leaks, blown fuses, thrown my sunglasses against a cinderblock wall (consequently breaking them) and generally have started to come to terms with the fact that (a) I currently don't know what I'm doing around here, for the most part; (b) most new homeowners are in the same boat that I am in; and (c) that I'll soon learn how resourceful I am.

Assuming that anyone out there is interested, as I make my way down the path of home ownership I'll periodically post here with updates (and pictures, where relevant) on our progress with the home.  I'll generally save this for projects that have either an interesting genesis or an interesting execution, since I'm no Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor and as a result, no one wants to hear boring home improvement stories from me.

That being said, I'll be sure to post if/when I injure myself or engage in a particularly colorful application of the word "Fuck" while completing said projects.

Buying a First Home (Update #2): Waiting to Close

I noticed that I last posted on the process of buying our first house on March 4.  It's now April 30, and several weeks - and more than one false start - later, we're still in our apartment, waiting another week or two to close on our new home.

Sometimes, it's good for me to write while angry; anger (for me, at least) leads to focus, focus leads to humor and what I consider to be quality writing.  It's reasonable to say that I'm more than a bit angry that our progress on buying this house has taken so long.  But it's the kind of anger where it's difficult to get up and write about it - it's dull and depressing and it makes me want to go outside, smoke a cigar, and listen to Coldplay.

That said, I should probably explain a bit more.  For instance, for an approximately sixteen hour period that occurred two weeks ago, we were under the impression that we would have already closed on the house and had our keys in hand.  This was ripped away (due to a myriad of excuses, none of which are likely to be true and none of which matter) by a quick phone call, while I was helping my mom garden at her house.  I got pissed off when I heard the news - like, really pissed off - and then I just started working on shit, because nothing beats physical labor when I'm pissed off.  My mom's front lawn looks better now, thanks in no small part to a hyper-Type A, anger-filled landscaper.

Here's what's gone down since you were last updated:

Step 5: Applying for a mortgage

This could be a post of its own, but I'll condense it here just to provide the highlights. 

The good news for people who are interested in buying a home in 2011 is that, for those with good credit and stable employment histories, interest rates for mortgages are historically low.  We chose what's known as a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, which means that we pay a fixed amount each month over thirty years.  We want to stay in this home for a good long time, and if you believe that inflation is going to skyrocket over the next ten years like I do, the payments should bite less and less over the years.  (As an aside, there are other mortgage types available, such as adjustable rate mortgages, where the interest rate on your loan stays constant for a certain number of years and then varies somewhat after that.  These aren't often sold anymore because evil variants of the adjustable rate mortgage [or ARM] are [mistakenly, in my opinion] considered responsible for the housing meltdown that led to the 2008 recession.  Holding ARMs responsible for the recession is like holding a specific type of bullet responsible for a rash of shootings, which is a shame because for people who don't want to stay in their home for more than five-to-seven years, they make a lot of sense due to the base interest rate being lower than the 30-year fixed interest rate.  Anyway, back to the post.)

The bad news is that it's becoming increasingly difficult these days to actually get approved for a mortgage (again, due to the housing meltdown of 2007 and onward).  Credit requirements have skyrocketed and you need to document a metric ton of information in order to get approved.  My fiancee and I had to provide three years of tax returns, multiple pay stubs, and bank statements showing more or less our entire cash flow for the past twelve months.  The person or persons investigating our mortgage application (these fine folks are known as underwriters) must have been former detectives from "The Wire," because even that wasn't enough for them to approve us as-is.

As but one example, my paycheck spells my first name slightly differently than my mortgage application (which uses my full, legal name).  This came up as a red flag on our application.  As a result, I had to provide a "Name Affidavit," which is a signed and notarized letter confirming that both names belong to the same person.  I now officially have an alias, an a/k/a if you will, which is awesome if I ever were to commit a felony or three.

As another example, my address on my paycheck is still listed as my mother's house, because I've been too lazy over the past two years to ask my boss to  change it.  Even though the paycheck year-end amount matches my income tax return, bam!  Another red flag.  To correct this one, I had to provide a "Letter of Explanation" which details the facts, states that I am very deeply sorry for the misinformation, and promises to change the address on my paystub as soon as I move.  Seriously, it was like writing a directive on the chalkboard 100 times, a la Bart Simpson.

Another interesting tidbit about the mortgage application process is that mortgage brokers are pretty shady people.  They are purely salespeople, in the sense that their job is to get you to fill out the application - once that's done, you're systematically shuffled off to another person (a loan processor) whose job it is to get you approved (or, more often these days, to explain why you were denied).  As salespeople, they are genetically engineered to (a) never provide a straight answer and (b) assume that they always have the best product.

Being the master negotiator that I am, I worked five brokers against each other, thought I made an apples-to-apples comparison, and even now I am not 100 percent convinced that we obtained the lowest interest rate possible.  That said, our closing costs are quite low (they can vary a great deal across different lenders) and perhaps even more important, we had an easy time getting approved for our mortgage.

(In case you were super curious, another issue that is currently plaguing the home buying process for many individuals is that homes don't appraise high enough anymore.  In order for a bank to approve your mortgage, the house needs to independently appraise at a value equal to or higher than what you offered in your contract.  Due to an odd quirk and an awesome house, we offered to pay a few thousand dollars higher than list price for the home we are buying.  As a result, we were on pins and needles for a few days waiting for the appraised value of the house, because there was at least some chance that the house would be valuated at a lower price than what we paid.  This didn't happen to us, but apparently it happens sometimes to others.)

The mortgage application process takes only about eleven business days, in which you'll be asked to provide lots of additional documentation (see above) and engage in lots of back and forth with the loan processor.  Ours was very responsive and very nice, thankfully, and the mortgage application process, which had cost us a considerable number of sleepless nights in anticipation, turned out to be not so bad in practice.

Step 6: Inspect Your New Home

At the same time as your mortgage is being processed, you should also schedule an inspection of your new home.  Some homeowners who are particularly handy individuals like to go in themselves and inspect.  I am not a handy individual (as you may have guessed), so we hired this out to a very nice man named Al.

Al spent two hours with us walking through the new house, inspecting each nook and cranny (inside and out), taking photographs and detailed notes where appropriate, in order to prepare a fairly detailed report for us.  This report is a cool thing to view, because it more or less tells you everything that is right and everything that is wrong about the house you're about to purchase.

The house we're buying has a 20+ year old central air conditioning unit, a 28 year old boiler and a 23 year old hot water heater.  Without going out on too much of a limb, I'm willing to wager anyone who wants to wager with me, at any odds they'll lay me, that these items will all need to be replaced within the next five years.  There was also some amateur electrical and gas pipe work in the basement that needed to be fixed before we buy the house.  These are fairly minor flaws in an otherwise rosy picture - the home has "good bones," it's well-sealed, has a newer roof and windows, and there were no obvious signs of decline or decay.

(So that's what people mean when they tell you that home ownership is a money pit; replacing those three items I just mentioned is going to cost us at least six thousand dollars over the next five years.  That's on top of our mortgage payment and property taxes (the property taxes alone are almost seven thousand dollars a year)). 

Step 7: Get Homeowners Insurance

There's not a ton to say here, but I do have a couple of minor points:

• Quality homeowners' insurance can be quite inexpensive, assuming you purchase it from the same company that handles your automobile insurance.  The discount for having multiple insurance products from the same insurer is significant, though it may only appear on one of the two policies.
• Most homeowners choose to make what's known as a "PITI" mortgage payment.  This is an acronym; it stands for Principal, Interest, Taxes, and Insurance.  It means that you're paying each month, in one lump sum, your mortgage payment (principal and interest), your property taxes, and your homeowners' insurance.  For some people, this is a nice thing to do because buying a home is insanely complicated and it helps to only have one bill to pay at the end of the month, for everything.

Step 8 (is great!): Closing on your Home

In theory, a closing is where you go to your attorney's office, sign tons of documents confirming that the house is indeed yours and that you're going to pay your bills on time for the next one-third of your life span, receive your new keys and drive away.

In practice, it's a mythical, Dark Tower-like place that can only be reached by accomplishing dozens of preliminary tasks and by somehow convincing a half-dozen people with ulterior motives to confirm a date and time and to actually attend.  That's my vision of the closing, because it hasn't happened yet for us.

I imagine when it does it'll be fairly anti-climactic, but for now, the closing is on a serious pedestal.  We're convinced that we're Charlie Brown running to kick the football, and that somehow, mere hours before the closing, Lucy is going to lift the football and we're going to whiff.  Lucy, in this case, represents the people we're buying a house from... or the people they're buying their new home from... or the attorneys... or some nameless schmo at the title search company that broke his ankle playing softball, missed a week of work, and consequently didn't process our paperwork on time for the closing.  Lucy can be anyone, and it's going to take a bunch of luck to get this right, and to get this done "on time" (whatever that means).

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I wrote a bunch of detailed, technical stuff above, and I want to conclude by mentioning that this is all just my opinion.  I'm a market researcher, not a mortgage or financial consultant, and for all I know, some of the things that I wrote above are undeniably false.  Just, um, covering my legal bases here. :-)

Once we're on the other side of this, and once we're home, I'll post again about the process in retrospect.  I'll be in a better mood then.

Grading Recent Commercials, Part IV: The Technology Edition

It's late March, and it's snowing in New Jersey.  This makes absolutely zero sense, so let's use "Chewbacca Theory" logic and rate a few commercials (some of which also make absolutely zero sense).

I've been thinking a lot about logic flaws lately, because I've been reading David Brooks' The Social Animal (review to come in a later blog post) and he makes some pretty excellent points about how each of us views the world in a fairly biased way.  As a marketing person, I believe that to the extent that a company has a structure, it also has a "personality," and these too can be fundamentally biased.

For instance, every company *thinks* they know who their customers are.  I recall being on a conference call with a client once (I never name names, but this client is very well-known and sells products that could be used by every American adult) to present research findings, and at one point toward the end of the presentation, the most senior-ranking client on the call said something along the lines of "Well, I guess it's just the psychology of the blue-collar American male" as a one-line summation of the research.

My personal dislike of one-liners and one-pagers aside, there's a larger problem with the above comment.  As an American male who is not blue-collar, but comes from a blue-collar town, and a blue-collar family, and knows lots of blue-collar people, I feel there is no single psychology of the blue-collar American male.

Most of the guys I know - regardless of the color of their collar - believe that Miller Lite commercials are stupid, for instance.  They may not think about them as much as I do (I, after all, write blog posts analyzing TV commercials), and it may not impact their purchasing decision as much, but they've at least given it enough thought to make the logical and accurate conclusion that they are fucking stupid.

I guarantee you Miller and Budweiser think they understand the psychology of the blue-collar American male (it only consists of boobs, jokes with xenophobic or sexist undertones, and sports), but they'd be wrong.  I blame buckets for this.

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Companies too often like to put their customers into buckets, which is a terrible idea for two reasons.  One, when you put people into buckets, because of the type of analysis you conduct to make this happen, you invariably leave some people out.  Segmenting your market is a concession; it basically says, "We don't care to lose customers, as long as we identify most of them."  This is bad, but it's not as bad as the other reason, which is that it's a lazy methodology.

This is because any decision the company makes after deciding to this is going to be biased toward the segments, which are themselves flawed.  Let's say you're a company, and you know you have four segments.  (You further know that you classify people into one of these four groups based on their responses to a series of attitudinal questions combined with a factor analysis, but this may be a bit too technical.)

Some people are very clearly in a segment; this is the easy stuff.  Many other people are defined as being in a particular segment, but based on their responses (and their underlying attitudes), they're very close to being in some other segment - it's like they're technically in New Jersey, but they're very close to being in Pennsylvania.  They might call "doing the wash" "doing the warsh," if you know what I mean.  But because of the limitations of your analysis, you are going to classify them as being in Segment 1 (let's say), and market to them as if they are Segment 1, but you'll be really inaccurate (on average) in doing this.

I'm not convinced that companies take the time to understand these caveats, and as a result I think that many companies treat flimsy research like it's sacrosanct.  And that's partly the reason why many companies make shitty commercials - they don't know who they are talking to, and they assume the people they are talking to are different than they really are.

On that note, let's get to the commercials...

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Commercial #1: Because Everyone Relates to Lazy, Rich Retards

I'm going to be quite cruel to DirecTV here, but later I'll be nicer (I promise).

This commercial bombs, primarily because it is obnoxious and not at all funny.  DirecTV may think that people are going to pay attention to ten seconds of yelling and screaming and whooping, but in reality, they're going to listen to it once, get annoyed, and then put the commercial on mute and resolve themselves never to buy DirecTV.  This commercial may be memorable, but it's not memorable in a good way.  You don't want to piss off your customers.

Being obnoxious and unfunny itself is not a death sentence for a commercial, but add a complete lack of being relate-able to the mixture and you're finished.  I can understand setting a commercial for items that are luxurious in nature in a mansion - in fact, it's the best place to set a commercial if you only care about selling your product to wealthy people.  But satellite TV is a middle-class product, and I'm convinced that below the surface, most of the people who watch this commercial tune out because they don't feel it applies to them.

This may require a leap of faith on your end, but there's research to support this point for certain.  People have a very good sense of who they are and how they stand in the world, and they are going to tune out to this commercial because it's set in an opulent setting. 

So, if DirecTV is looking for increased sales from wealthy people who are also stupid, congratulations on willing the Callahan Auto Parts account.  Otherwise, it fails completely.

Grade: F

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Commercial #2: I Am Epic Win

Now let me take a right turn and explain to you how the very same company could use a very similar framework and end up with a much better commercial.  It's called humor and execution.

The above commercial is the second in a series involving a hilariously-rich Russian dude with a pet miniature giraffe.  (The first one, if you recall, begins with the grammatically incorrect yet memorable line: "Opulence. I has it.")  This commercial is better for the following reasons:

• It's actually funny.  I know, I know, this is just my opinion, and other people might completely disagree.  But I believe that some people are naturally inclined toward having a quality sense of humor in general, and I further believe I am one of those people.  This commercial is actually funny; between the muscle-bound guy on the left and the pygmy giraffe working out alongside the woman on the right, it's hard not to chuckle at all this.
• The giraffe.  Clearly the giraffe tested well, because they show it again in this commercial - and even more prominently than in the first.  The first scene with the giraffe is so short you might miss it; but you'll see the second one, because it's so weird, and then you'll want to watch the commercial again to figure out what it all means. 
• It has a clear and simple message that is easy to remember (especially with Charlie Sheen in the news).  DirecTV = winning.  Don Draper would appreciate such a simple message.

The commercial isn't without flaws; the Russian accent on the main dude is way too thick (even if you're familiar with thick Russian accents, it takes a few views to understand it).  Some people might also complain that it's too "busy," visually speaking - I think there's some merit to that as well, but I also think it's part of the commercial's intent.

Grade: B

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Commercial #3: Sprint's Wireless Service is for Assholes

Earlier, I mentioned that every company has a "personality."  What I mean by this is that it's possible if you pay close enough attention to make fairly accurate statements like "Wow, I bet the management team for that company are all huge douchebags" (e.g., Cablevision) or "Holy shit, what a bunch of fucking hipster shillers" (e.g., Apple).

Relatedly, it always baffles me why a commercial would ever show someone using their product and being a huge dick at the same time.  Are you trying to sell your product to massive dicks?  Have all the decent people already gone to your competitor?  And most importantly, why didn't anyone at the company take the time to vet this and say "Wait.  We are trying to sell a decent product to decent people.  This doesn't accomplish this at all."

The one memorable aspect of the above commercial is that the doctor is being a huge, insensitive dick to the football player.  This is a bad idea in general because, as I just mentioned, you don't want people to associate your product with assholery.  More specifically, you're selling a smart phone here, and most people who do not own a smart phone are worried about becoming huge insensitive dicks who only pay attention to their smart phone.  (That's more or less why they haven't bought a smart phone yet.)  Maybe if you convinced them that by buying a smart phone, they would be able to do things better, and then they'd actually buy one.  But that's clearly not the case in this commercial.

This brings me to the most general point of my post.  There are very few psychological truths, but one that I feel actually exists is that everyone - regardless of whether they are a saint or a serial killer - wants to believe that they're a good person.  If a commercial makes a genuine connection to this, then people start to pay attention.  And every commercial that takes the opposite tack, by showing insensitivity or meanness to others, is less successful than it could be.  So Sprint fails.

Grade: D

Buying a First Home, An Update: Not Knowing About Things

See that picture, to the right?  In about two months, that's gonna be my kitchen.  When I wake up on a Sunday morning craving a Western omelet, I am going to make a Western omelet on that stove.  When I need to wash dishes, I'll wash dishes in that sink; when I make meat loaf, it'll be in that oven; and when I want to have a cold beer after a hard day's work, I'll grab one out of that stainless steel fridge*, sit in one of those chairs* on that center island, and sip it slowly.

*NOTE: The stainless steel fridge and chairs are not included in sale.

Earlier this week, our home buying finished attorney review, which essentially means that - barring a rare, unforeseen circumstance - we'll be able to move into our first "adult" home some time around mid-May.  Of course, when I use terms like "rare" and "unforeseen," I don't quite know what I'm talking about, because I am a first-time home buyer, and my role is to get f**ked over completely unawares to how, why, and with what instrument.

As far as I can tell, here are the steps in the home buying process (h/t to The Oatmeal for graphical analogy):

Step 1: Decide to buy a home.
 
This could be motivated by a number of reasons, be they financial, emotional, or some combination of the two. For us, we were tired of apartment living because (a) we wanted "our own" space; (b) we didn't want to be transient and shiftless any more; and (c) we were tired of having a washer and dryer in our kitchen. (No, seriously, we have a washer and dryer in our kitchen in our current apartment.)

So in this phase, you align yourself with a realtor and look at houses.  Some realtors tell you that you only need to look at a small number of houses; thankfully, ours let us look at about thirty-five of them before we found "the one."  Perhaps this was just a function of the buyer's market, or perhaps she found our quirkiness endearing, but regardless, we did find "the one" - eventually.  It took two months.

Step 2: Create a short list, call in reinforcements... err, your parents.

Our "the one" was a throw in.  We had an original short list, and when you have a short list, you should look for a second opinion.  We brought in our parents that weekend, and we threw "the one" onto our list of houses to look at at the very last minute, because it just came on the market and the pictures looked cool.

After a rather up-and-down experience with our original short list, we walked into "the one" and we immediately flipped out.  No, actually, our parents flipped out.  At one point, my mother was gushing so effusively about the home (the owners were still there) that I had to take her aside and say "Mom, you might be costing us a lot of money right now!".

This was on a Saturday, and it was our first look.  We came back the very next day, and the next day after that, we met at our realtor's office and made an offer.

Step 3: Make an offer.

If you've ever seen one of those HGTV "First-time Homebuyer" shows (and, sadly, I have), you think that making an offer on a house is a dramatic process.  You'd think that you make your offer, your realtor leaves the room and calls the selling realtor, and within thirty minutes or maybe an hour you'd have a deal.  And for all I know, back in 2006 when real estate was a hot commodity, it was indeed a process just like this.

But if your experience was anything like ours, it was the most anticlimactic thing ever.  You'll sign a shit-ton of paperwork - all of which will eventually get amended, revised, or completely canceled - you'll leave, and you'll wait.  In our case, we waited about a week for our contract to be accepted.  Our sellers took their time (for good reason, actually), and were honest (we believe) throughout the entire process.  You need to have that trust, and to obtain that trust, you need a realtor who's willing to ask the tough questions.  Thankfully, ours was/remains very tough.

Step 4: Offer accepted (conditionally); time to bring in the lawyers and learn why everyone hates attorneys.

Once our offer was signed, it goes into attorney review.  In New Jersey, that's a mandated time period consisting of at least three business days (ours took ten) where your lawyer and the seller's lawyer work out the minutia and negotiate in order to facilitate what, in theory, should be a fairly seamless transaction.

I'll admit here that although I am not a lawyer, I find the law quite fascinating and I saw this as a unique opportunity to understand an aspect of the law I had never been exposed to.  I ended up so disillusioned with the very idea of real estate law that I never want to work with an attorney again, under any set of circumstances, ever.  And, we're two months ahead of closing.  Woohoo!

Here's what you can expect from your attorney:

• You'll hear one price, and then be charged another, and the second price will be higher.  (In fact, this is fairly common around all aspects of real estate; we learned a valuable, $100 lesson here - ALWAYS get an estimate in writing ahead of time.)
• Responses to your queries that serve his/her best interests in getting the deal done; not your best interests as the client.  The lesson here: always ask for the documentation supporting their decision.  You may find that you don't agree with their conclusion, at which point you should speak up.
• No straight answers (which is related to the bullet point immediately above).  In grad school, you learn to respond to things as succinctly and directly as possible.  At times, I am too direct.  But had I gone to law school instead, I would have learned to be evasive and to use such ambiguous, non-committal language that no real conclusion could be drawn from the words I chose.  It really upsets me that this skill is considered two times (at least) more valuable by the economic marketplace, vs. my own.  Mine is more challenging!

Next Steps: Applying for a mortgage; home inspection.

We haven't done these yet, but this is what's next.  Soon, we'll learn what it's like to be screwed over by a lending institution, which should be fun.

Realize that I'm not yet jaded about owning a home; simply the process involved in buying one.  I can't wait to sit on my patio, smoke a cigar and drink a beer on the night that I move in.  Having said that, it's an exhausting amount of back and forth, and what I think we didn't realize when we got started was just how much effort it takes to keep all of these vendors talking to one another.  Combining this with wedding planning, it's a lot.  But we'll pull through.

Updates to come in the weeks ahead...

Grading Recent Commercials, Part III: The Potpourri Edition

We put a bid on a house last week and it was accepted earlier today.  We're in attorney review, and the next blog post will tell more about how all that jazz works out.  For now, let's blow off some steam by grading some more recent TV commercials.

As always, commercials are ranked on a standard grading scale, from A+ to F, where A+ is Ivan Drago and F is Tommy Gunn.

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Commercial #1: Why So Woman-Focused?


Sometimes, I look at a commercial and think: this is such a good idea in general, why do you make me not want to use your product so much?  This is true for commercials for most chocolate bars, TV dinners, and products used for cleaning the house, where I watch the commercial and wonder fuck the heck the advertising agency (no, most likely the client) was thinking.

I'll be honest: I am a manly man, and I love chocolate bars.  I occasionally eat TV dinners (even, gasp, "diet" ones), and I get my ass up early every Saturday morning and clean the apartment because I like to clean.  (No, I do not wear French maid costumes while doing so.)

So whenever someone (whether it's Dove chocolate or Bud Light) markets a product toward one gender only, I generally assume that they're okay with not doubling their sales.  We've become a society that despises both "girl talk" and "bro talk."  There's a way to get your product sold without catering to only men or only women, and if you're smart enough, you'll find it.  No matter what, the end consumer is smart enough to know when they're not being spoken to.  And this brings me to Angie's List.

Angie's List is a subscription service that exists in a number of metropolitan areas, which allows users to view and contribute to comments and rankings regarding local services, such as contractors, plumbers, housekeepers, etc.  It's like TripAdvisor, but because you're paying for the service one might reasonably assume that the comments are vetted and are of higher, more objective quality.

FWIW, I think Angie's List is a fantastic idea.  As but one example, there's this new generation of first-time homebuyers (and I am one of them) who are used to going on the Internet in order not only to find answers, but we also have the expectation that, among several answers, we should be able to determine which answer is "best".  Where past generations would typically ask family or neighbors for a plumber recommendation, we would rather determine which plumber in town gets the most positive five-star ratings.  We are the most empirical generation ever, and Angie's List speaks to this need by providing the raw data.

I've watched several of the Angie's List commercials (one is above), and all - except one - is clearly not only designed for women, but is overtly and (I feel) offensively designed for women.  The one above has a female narrator who hired a housekeeper who whistles an annoying tune, but is so good at her job that it's okay.  After she's done speaking, there's another narrator voice (again a woman) who pitches the service.  Oh, and everything at the end of the commercial is pink.  And almost every other Angie's List commercial is like this.

So I'm just going to say this, and move on to the next commercial.  Angie's List is not a tampon.  It is an excellent idea with mainstream appeal and many men would pay for it if it didn't make them feel like they were picking out window treatments.  Men need plumbers, too.

Grade: F, for Feminist, because that's clearly what I am.

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Commercial #2: Smart People Like Animals, Stupid People LOOOOOOOVE Them

If you're like me and you don't deal drugs in East Baltimore, you also don't pre-pay for your cell phone.  You probably sign a contract with your cell phone provider and upgrade your phone for free every couple of years.  This is because you have a credit history - not a good credit history, but any kind of credit history at all.  I suppose lots of people do like to use burners, though, and RadioShack indeed has an ad for that.

In the below ad, nothing important is said.  It's just a male bulldog and a female cat, talking about stupid stuff.  You shouldn't click on the link to the video below, unless you want to lose brain cells.  It's hard to understand how anyone could possibly pay attention to this for more than a few seconds, but I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and tell you what the commercial has going for it:

• The characters use Southern accents, which makes sense because the South has 31% of the money that the North has and burner phones are cheap.
• It features quirky animation, which at least grabs your peripheral attention.
• The conversation, while complete nonsense, is vaguely sexual, which is peripherally attractive to some people.
• It has dogs and cats, which OMG are sooooo cutttteeeeeee...

Obviously, I hate this commercial.  But I imagine that, like Sarah Palin, it's effective for the people it's supposed to be effective for (if this makes sense).  I'd personally rather have a two-year contract, but I also don't have to worry about Detective McNulty, so bully for me.

Grade: F

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Commercial #3: What Detroit Got Right

I often critique car commercials, both because cars are awesome and because cars are super-expensive, which necessarily makes the art of selling them more important than would be selling, say, a set of Tupperware or something.  Over the past decade, no car-maker (domestic or foreign) has faced a tougher road than Chrysler. Their line of passenger cars and minivans has been notable only for its design flaws, poor quality, and lackluster look.  Compared with the other "Big Three" automakers - Ford and GM - Chrysler has certainly been behind the pack leaders for quite a while.  So I, like you, was astounded to see the following commercial during this month's Super Bowl, and as a result I have to analyze it a bit.  Below is the extended, two-minute version, which you can't find on TV anymore:

What I love about this commercial is the following:

1. The dialogue: Somehow the voiceover work for what I think is a luxury car commercial sounded edgy, brash, and blue-collar, and all the while matched the essence of the commercial - namely, that Detroit (and its cars) are resurgent, and we should all buy one.  Usually if you strip away just the wording of a luxury car commercial and repeat it to yourself out loud, you'll sound like the douchiest douche that ever douched.  Not in this case.  The lyrics (and yes, this commercial had lyrics) told a story, accentuated by the phrase "to hell and back," which worked better than 99.99% of any of the curse words I ever used, and effectively communicated what the Chrysler 200 stands for.
2. The voiceover artist:  A 59-year-old gruff-looking freelance voiceover artist from Michigan was the voice you heard in this commercial.  He sounded perfect; he sounded like Detroit.  He sounded like the kind of guy who's spent every Friday night following his Cutty Sark with an unironically-consumed PBR.  He sounds like he belongs to an autoworkers union and actually works hard.  He sounds old and wrecked by cigarettes and angry, and (here I'm conjecturing a bit) that's how we should feel when we think about Detroit and the sad stories it contains. 
3. The car: Black was a good choice for the color.  It looks sleek.  I'll wait for Consumer Reports to recommend it first.
4. The cinematography: We needed to physically see Detroit in this commercial, and this commercial managed to capture a city in two minutes in the same way that David Simon captured Baltimore in "The Wire."  Gritty, tough as nails, sad but defiant.  Short snippets worked way better than a smaller number of longer shots would have.  It was like being taken for a ride.
5. Eminem, and specifically the strategic use of his 2002 hit "Lose Yourself" juxtaposed with a gospel choir: Holy shit, that was really cool.  The "Lose Yourself" beat alone is often enough to prompt riots.  The gospel remix, particularly in the empty worndown theater, had spectacular dramatic effect.  Not thrilled with the last ten seconds of the commercial - Eminem doesn't sound like he's from Detroit - but that's a minor quibble.

So, in general, I loved this commercial.

In cinema, when I think of how music can interplay with cinematography and dialogue, I always think of Scorcese.  The scene from "Goodfellas" where you see how the crew got killed one at a time, to the tune of the piano coda to Clapton's "Layla," is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.  It's both jarring and beautiful, it outlines death in all its brutality, and the music blends with the camerawork to create a coherent experience.  It's the scene in the movie that people talk about the most, and with good reason.

I realize that we're talking about a commercial here.  It's obviously derivative to the type of feel and musical juxtaposition that Scorcese (and others) have been using for the past twenty years, and it's also impossible to provide much of the same context in a commercial's timeframe (even if the commercial clocks in at over two minutes).  But it gets an A for effort, for being memorable, and for being extremely well thought-out.

Grade: A